Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (9 page)

She felt Scott's hand in hers and managed to move a finger. "Can you hear me?" he asked.

Her eyes slowly opened. A nurse wheeled the baby in on a table. She was the tiniest person Minda had ever seen. Her black hair was three or four inches long, and dark fuzz covered her shoulders, legs and back. Minda thought, My boys didn't look like that. They're both so fair. From far away she heard one of the nurses say, "Boy, where did this one come from?"

She stayed in the hospital for a week while her infant daughter fought for her life in a preemie ward seventy miles north (and ran up a bill that would take the Brinkerhoffs seven years to pay). Amber Dawn's birth certificate listed her weight as seven pounds, but to Minda she hadn't looked half that big.

Her mother returned from a visit to the Billings hospital and told about a conversation with one of the pediatricians. He'd said, "These wet lungs often happen in premature babies."

"She's full term," Arden said.

"Her lungs weren't fully developed," the doctor insisted. "This baby is six to eight weeks early."

Amber Dawn Brinkerhoff stayed in the hospital for three more weeks while her mother grieved at home, confined to her bed on Dr. Story's orders. Minda found that the maternal instinct was strongest just after delivery. She twisted up her bedding on the cool fall nights and called for Amber in her sleep. She wished she understood what was happening. Dr. Story had been way off on the due date. Why had he insisted? Why hadn't he been more accurate?

Arden took the baby in for her first checkup while Minda continued to rest up. By this time the fuzz had begun to disappear from Amber's back and shoulders, but her dark skin and eyes made her look different from Curtis and Garret Mac. Several friends had taken notice.

When her mom returned with the baby in her arms, she was chuckling. "What's so funny?" Minda asked.

"When I walked in, the nurse said, 'Oh, grandma's got the baby, huh?' So I just said, 'Hey, take a good look. This is Dr. Story's baby.' We both laughed. It was our little joke."

For months, Minda had realized that her husband was growing restless, but it wasn't his nature to share his feelings. Scott wasn't bookish, but he was quick and bright, and for two and a half years all he'd done to exercise his brain was work a control panel at the bentonite plant.

One night he came home with the usual film of greenish dust in his hair, and said, "I looked at the guy next to me today, Minda. He's sixty, sixty-five years old. I said to myself, Man, am I gonna be pushing these buttons for the next forty-some years? I can't see myself doing that. We're already in debt, and it's just gonna get worse on my salary."

They decided to sell their half-completed new home and their Ford Bronco and do what Mormons had done for a hundred and fifty years—pack up and head out. They both loved their hometown, but Lovell was more of a dead end than ever. The lack of a future was what drove so many of its young people to drink and drugs. One of the town's biggest employers, the Lovell Clay Products Co. (known for forty years as "the brick 'n' tile") was collapsing on its own bricks, a victim of the nation-wide switch to plastic pipe. The annual beet campaign hadn't started; the sugar refinery at the west end of Main Street lay in hibernation. Pumping jacks jerked up and down in the oil fields, but whenever petroleum demand dropped off, workers were laid off. Employers took advantage of the unsettled conditions and paid accordingly. Those who didn't like the low wages could always rent a few hundred acres and sow some beets or barley, but even if they observed the back-breaking Mormon work ethic to the letter, they usually went broke.

Scott decided to break Lovell's grip on his life. He took some tests and won a scholarship to Western Wyoming College in Rock Springs, three hundred miles to the southwest. He didn't know what to study, but it wouldn't be bentonite. When Minda's big sister Marie suggested computer technology, he said, "Sure. Why not?"

Dr. Story seemed upset at the news. "How
can
you?" he asked Minda. "You've got a home here, you've got roots."

"Scott needs to go to computer school," Minda said, feeling defensive.

"Well, that's silly. You were just settling down here. You have a beautiful family. This is a lovely place to raise children. Why, you and Scott grew up here!"

She thought, Is this his idea of counseling? What's he so uptight about? He should be encouraging us. All we're trying to do is better ourselves.

Newly settled in a Rock Springs apartment, she was troubled by a crazy thought: Could Amber be Dr. Story's baby? The idea wouldn't go away. The child was certainly different. And he'd always acted as though she were special to him.

Minda had a hard time sorting out her feelings about this latest squawling Brinkerhoff. She felt resentful when Amber caused problems, and then felt guilty about the resentment. She'd never been a demanding mother, but these days a wet diaper could send her into a tirade.

For a while, she lost herself in hard labor. She took orders at Taco Time, drove a Rock Springs school bus, hired on as a janitor for the Sweetwater County School District. One day she discovered that her throat was sore and her tongue swollen. A female doctor in Green River said, "You're worn out and you're a nervous wreck. Get this prescription filled. You've got to get hold of your life. Do it now!"

Minda ordered herself to stop dwelling so much on Dr. Story and Amber and her other problems. They were probably just a bunch of weird fixations. It wasn't long before she began to feel better. The prescription went unfilled.

Pregnant for the fourth time, she didn't want to make 400-mile round trips on icy roads to return to Dr. Story, but after three

C-sections no obstetrician in Rock Springs would take her case. They told her to stick with the man who knew her best.

For the first six months of her pregnancy, she treated herself. Then she drove her children to Lovell and temporarily moved in with her parents. In the last two months of her pregnancy, Dr. Story gave her seven pelvics, each more painful than the last.

She selected Scott's birthday in December for the delivery in Lovell's hospital. At her request, Dr. Story also planned to give her a "bilateral tubal ligation and transection," which translated to "sterilization." She didn't care about the fancy terms; she just wanted to survive this birth and retire from the pregnancy business.

By now she knew the procedure backward. He would scrub her up, numb her abdomen, make his incision and burn away the old scar tissue. At that point her eyes would be closed, but she always smelled the charred flesh. Soon he would say, "Okay, I can see the baby. You're ready to go under." He would have a minute or two to lift the baby out. She would wake up and find out whether she'd had a girl or boy.

This time it was different.

Just as he was getting ready to start, there was a sharp knock on the delivery room door. A voice called out, "Dr. Story, it's an emergency."

Then he was gone. Minda was disgusted. She thought, Can't he ever get his act together? He's delivering my baby; what could be more important than that?

No one explained or apologized. Didn't they know she was scared? The anesthetist and the nurses acted as though she were a dead body at a surgical demonstration. They told doctor jokes, not one of them funny. She thought she would vomit, or die.

Dr. Story returned, sweat gleaming on his wide forehead. "Put her under!" he ordered.

She thought, What about the other steps? Why the hurry? A voice said, "Are you sure?"

"Put her under now!"

The next thing she knew, a nurse was showing her a chubby baby girl and informing her breathlessly that her father had suffered a heart attack. "Don't worry," the nurse told her. "He's out of danger." During the forty-five minutes she'd waited on the table, Dr. Story had been saving her dad's life.

When her head cleared, Minda felt sick all over again about her poor father, but infinitely better about the family doctor. He'd brought beautiful Shanardean (from "Shan" and "Arden" and "Dean") into the world with one hand and saved her dad with the other. Minda, she told herself, how could you ever distrust a man like that?

She decided that the experience with Bob Asay must have warped her mind. Dr. Story was
nothing
like Uncle Bob. He was a healer, not a pervert. The middle child offered up a prayer for her dad and the doctor. Wondrous were the ways of Father in Heaven!

After nine days in the hospital, she drove her baby back to Rock Springs, where Scott was finishing up his computer course, and went shopping for someone to remove her stitches. Once again the local physicians referred her to Dr. Story, but he was too far away and she didn't cherish the idea of a postnatal pelvic.

One of Scott's new friends, a fire department aidman, snipped out the stitches while Minda lay modestly draped in towels on her kitchen table.

A few days later, the incision began to weep, and she sped to Lovell. Dr. Story treated the problem, gave her a pelvic, and told her not to worry.

She said, "I really shouldn't be here, because we owe you a lot of money." The young Brinkerhoffs had no health insurance, and they owed a bundle to Dr. Story and several other specialists and hospitals.

He smiled and asked, "How much do you owe me?"

"Fifteen hundred," Minda said. She felt
so
ashamed. Her parents paid their bills on time.

Dr. Story asked, "How do you know it's that high?"

"I got a bill from Marilyn the other day. It said the bill had to be paid or else."

"Well," he said firmly, "you'll never receive another bill like

"DOC"

that. You pay on it however you can and whenever you can. Don't worry about it."

Minda thought, Well, isn't that just like him! No wonder Mom takes him cinnamon rolls on his birthday.

6

ARDEN McARTHUR

She'd always had visions and premonitions, and now she saw Dean slipping away. The city shoved a highway through their farm, appropriated some of their land, and clove the rest in two. It wasn't a farm anymore, but it didn't matter. Dean was too sick to work the big spread and tend all the animals, and he began to sell off the rest of their land and take part-time jobs that weren't too hard on his heart. He'd always been a two-hundred pounder, as sturdy as one of his beeves, but with congestive heart deterioration and so much forced inactivity, he soon ballooned up to nearly three hundred.

Dr. Story kept warning that he was eating his way into his family's burial plot. Dean complained to Arden, "I'm not going to the doctor just to be told I need to lose weight. I
know
that already." A few days later he was drawn up in pain, and she drove him to the clinic.

"I'm telling you, Dean," Dr. Story said in his whispery voice, "you have to lose weight." Dean moaned, too weak to argue. A few days later, he was rushed to Billings for open-heart surgery.

Through the difficult months, Dr. Story was always available by beeper or phone call, and Arden thanked the Lord for sending such a paragon to care for her loved ones. She told her children that their dad would already be waiting for them in the Celestial Kingdom if it weren't for John Story. Sometimes her sick husband awoke in the middle of the night sucking in air by the teaspoonful, eyes rolling like a tied calf's, his big hands clenched and clammy. A telephone call brought Dr. Story in ten minutes with his black bag and his soft voice and his calmness—always so controlled, a rock for his patients.

Arden had done the Story clinic's washing for years, ever since the town laundry had gone out of business. Helping a doctor, whether he was LDS or not, came under the heading of "compassionate service," and she tried to set a good example as a member of the Relief Society. But Dean's heart problems were running the family bill up higher than their cash flow could handle, and Dr. Story insisted that she receive financial credits for her laundry work. "It's a pittance," she informed Dean, too sick to respond. "I told him, 'I will do this for you as a friend.'" She never noticed whether he adjusted their bill. And she still delivered fresh-baked rolls to the doctor's home.

He'd treated her for arthritis for five or six years, tried several different approaches to relieve her pain—cortisone, prednisone, hot wax, sulfa, some drugs she couldn't spell. He told her she might have rheumatic fever, and promised that he wouldn't give up till he'd made her well.

The two true believers never stopped debating religion. Sometimes Arden's half-hour appointment would stretch to two or three while they worked at mutual conversion. They had a few harsh words after the daughter of another Bible Church elder talked Arden's daughter Mia into driving sixteen miles north to Frannie to watch a propaganda film called
The God Makers,
which was nothing more than a frontal assault on the Saints. Three hundred and fifty people attended, some of them hooting with derision at sacred LDS rituals like baptism for the dead and temple marriage, and Mia had come home upset. Arden suspected that the Lovell Bible Church had financed the event and told Dr. Story so.

He assured her that she was wrong. "Somebody wanted to show that movie in our church and I told them absolutely not," he insisted. "I knew it would offend my LDS friends." But he never denied that he'd seen the film himself or approved of it. She suspected that he did. It was a standard item in the Mormon-bashing hagiography, and she was sure she'd heard some of its trickiest arguments echoing from his mouth.